Mixed Signals

Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise

Rupert Goodwins

Rupert has worked at ZDNet UK, IT Week, PC Magazine, Computer Life, Mac User, Alfa Systems, Amstrad, Sinclair, Micronet 800, Marconi Space and Defence Systems, and a dodgy TV repair shop in the back streets of Plymouth. He can still swap out a gassy PL509 with the best of 'em. If you want to promote your company or product, fine -- but please tell me what it is and why it's interesting right up front in the message. PRs: the probability of a successful pitch can be calculated by the following handy formula applied to the details of your client's latest wheeze. 3NT x 4UP x 2BI x 5EAI = P(copy)3M^3 x 2ACE x 10L, where NT = New Technology, UP = Unique Product, BI = Beer Involved, EAI = Engineers Available for Interview, M = Marketing Managers, EMEA or Mornings, ACE = Already Covered Elsewhere (i.e. your American brethren have already spilled the beans) and L = the word Leading or Leader in the first para of the press release. Dear Engineer, Researcher or Inventor: Talk to me -- it's the new stuff that makes this game worthwhile.

Latest Posts

Google has begun to give details of Dart, a new language that the company says is intended for structured web coding.The designers of the language say that their aims were to make a familiar, natural language for web programming that has high performance, is flexible yet encourages structure.

Chancellor George Osborne has promised £50 million for research into graphene, the carbon-based material tipped as a breakthrough in material science, nanotechnology and electronics.Graphene was discovered in 2004 by Dr (now Professor) Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from the University of Manchester in work that won them the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics.

The most interesting and significant aspect of Amazon's Kindle announcements on Thursday was not the hardware, diverting as it might be. It was Silk, the browser that the Kindle Fire runs - currently, the only browser it can run.

Amazon has unveiled four new Kindle e-readers and a new browser, Silk, that runs partially in the cloud.The four Kindles include a Wi-Fi only, smaller and lighter keyboardless version of the current Kindle, costing $79 in the US and £89 in the UK.

Google is setting up shop in London's East End, and has rented a seven storey building in the heart of the capital's nascent technology quarter.Situated in Bonhill Street just south of Old Street tube station, the lease on the 26,000 square foot building will run until at least 2022 and was advertised most recently at a rent of £400,000 per year.

Our Tech Family Tree — History of the iPhone has been out now for just over a week and unlike the iPhone 4 we've been delighted by its reception.The best bit has been doling out the posters at various events — Jack Clark managed to donate a couple at the Intel Developer Forum to passing execs, while I've been peppering the occasional freebie around London — and seeing people get caught up in this or that bit of information which fires their interest.

The deal Leo Apotheker pushed through HP agreeing to buy UK data analysis company Autonomy may prove to have been one of the triggers for his demise, but his replacement is highly unlikely to be able to back out.Despite reports of very strong shareholder disapproval for the acquisition, three key factors work together to lock in the deal.

At the behest of Microsoft and others, the American trade regulator the FTC has started investigating whether Google is abusing its position as the leading search engine to promote its own services above the competition. The question is: how evil is Google being?

ZDNet UK is extremely pleased to announce Tech Family Tree — the History of the iPhone.It's a colourful, detailed, entertaining look at the technologies, events, discoveries and people who've helped create the modern smartphone over the past hundred years and more.

The Business Software Alliance, that concerned body in the US which bangs the drum for victims of crime — Microsoft, Adobe et al — has produced another fine survey setting out the sheer scale of global anarchy in the software industry.That survey, the BSA says, shows that around half of the world's computer users "acquire their software by illegal means most or all of the time," with the figure for China topping the league at 81 percent.

A number of high profile websites have had access disrupted on Sunday evening by a DNS hack. The Register, The Daily Telegraph, UPS, BetFair and Acer are among those where access has been redirected to an attacker's home page; at the time of writing, users of Sky and Be Internet are reporting the diversion.

According to reports from finance site Barron's and from a source familiar with the plant, Intel has suspended a planned upgrade to its Irish chip manufacturing plant, Fab 24.Barron's quoted analyst C J Muse from Barclays Capital as saying that "...